Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?

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1.
I learned about the unfathomable amount of cash that Yahoo planned to throw at Tumblr last month, when the news inevitably crept up on my Tumblr dashboard. The reactions were predictably negative, and the general sentiment was clear: “They are going to ruin all of what we’ve built.” For the most part, they echoed the reactions of the press at large, questioning yet another one of these crazy big internet deals, the wisdom of banking so much on users as advertising targets, and the near-universal assertion that you “can’t buy cool.” Was there ever a more stark contrast than between the purple-and-white tabloid jumble of Yahoo’s homepage and the stripped-down malleability of Tumblr? Yahoo went on record promising “not to screw it up,” which was somehow less reassuring than it should have been.

But I lead a double life on Tumblr: I follow bookish people and things, posting my own work there, attached to my real name, but I also lurk around a number of interlocking fandoms — interlocking because one has inevitably led me to the next: as people whose taste I trust migrate towards new obsessions, I sometimes migrate in turn. They have begun to crowd my dash, the weight of a thousand animated gifs slowing the site’s functionality to a crawl — and I love everything about them. There is a vernacular that links these communities, some of it held over from the time when LiveJournal ruled the fannish world, and some of it new and constantly evolving, borne on a blogging platform designed for sharing and speed and expansive warm-heartedness — I spend so much time smiling while scrolling around on Tumblr that it’s kind of alarming. (I browse Twitter stony-faced, occasionally barking out a harsh laugh, which means I’m either doing it wrong or Twitter and I just aren’t meant for each other.)

For the most part, fan communities seem to shy away from any organization that tries to insert itself from the top down. There is a sense that on Tumblr, fandom is planted and cultivated — grown, in a way that feels more palpable than LiveJournal ever did. It’s in your average stack of reblogged posts, fanning out in a sideways pyramid, each subsequent comment riffing on the one before it — and then seeing it days later, the joke or the expression of sympathy of the series of gifs piling up exponentially. You go to “like” it and note, with some surprise, that you already have. You can literally build on an idea, and this is how fandoms blossom and thrive.

It is an organic space, which must be at the heart of what’s made it such an unprofitable space, the sponsored posts unobtrusively tucked over to the far right, simple enough to train your eye away from, and subtle enough to even invite a curious click or two. But how would the intrusion of an organization as heavy-handed as Yahoo affect these communities? Rumors began to spread suggesting that content would soon be censored, and that advertisers would be given much more space within a matter of days. Nothing was confirmed, but a vague sense of foreboding persisted: would they know to leave well enough alone, or would all of this organic community building prove too tempting not to attempt to monetize, to control, to ruin?

The answer, of course, remains to be seen — it’s far too early in the game. We woke up to a blogging platform that looked much the same as the day before; a week later, no discernible change. The site chugs onwards, a million little corners of the internet, perfect little microcosms of the world — or the world as we wish it could be. For now, anyway.

2.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the same week as the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition, Amazon announced a project entitled “Kindle Worlds.” It feels like more of a broader trend than a coincidence, because the Kindle Worlds endeavor is about an organization inserting itself from the top down. “Worlds,” we learn, are Amazon-ese for fandoms — individual universes constructed by books, movies, television shows, comics, etc. — and the program is a platform for publishing fan fiction — quoting myself here, from a year ago (I’m currently accepting my lot as The Millions’ official fanfic correspondent): “fan fiction is original work with largely unoriginal foundations, in which writers take established fictional worlds and spin them into something else entirely.” Yeah, I apparently used the term “worlds” as well, but at least I didn’t capitalize it.

The Amazon deal was struck with Alloy Entertainment, the YA juggernaut behind Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars, amongst a number of other ubiquitous book-cum-television-show enterprises about teenage girls being cruel and/or sexy. These three are the official launch-point for Kindle Worlds: fanfic writers in these communities (and elsewhere eventually, Amazon promises, with “licenses for more Worlds on the way”) will be able to digitally publish their stuff for Kindle via Amazon, exchanging full rights to their ideas for somewhere between 20-35% of the profits, based on the length of their stories. The first offerings when the store launches in June will be commissioned works, the Worlds homepage filled with cheerful testimonials from these writers beside a dusting of hard facts and figures.

Much has already been written on the financial and legal details of Kindle Worlds, and the interpretations tend to vary based on the source. With a few exceptions, fan fiction is written, disseminated, and consumed entirely for free: obvious legal reasons compel writers to mark each story with very clear disclaimers, crediting their source material, however far an interpretation strays from the original. In the extremely rare instance that a fan work is published for money, it is after the story has been transformed beyond recognition — the Fifty Shades trilogy is the most famous example, evolving from 100 chapters of Twilight fan fiction. To the casual observer, Kindle Worlds might seem like a vast step up for your average fanfic writer, the best of whom are paid in praise alone. There’s actual money here, though, to be fair, not a whole lot of it, accompanied the establishment’s stamp of approval, published by Amazon and sanctioned by the corporation that owns the source material.

The actual money leads to other financial questions, because with Alloy, we’re not talking about borrowing the characters of a single author: these books, and the scripts of the accompanying shows, are written by a slew of work-for-hire writers. Book-industry types far more familiar with media tie-in writing than me have suggested that the Kindle Worlds move might be another Amazon attempt to circumvent traditional publishers and writing models. If this actually catches on, Alloy and other organizations may come out winners, because by publishing on this platform, a fan fiction writer gives up rights to the content of their stories — Alloy and Amazon will have full rights to original characters and ideas. Why hire a team of traditional writers when your fans can generate new ideas for you — at no cost beyond the few cents per Kindle single you’re required to pay them?

The whole venture hints at broader questions that swirl around a lot of Amazon’s recent projects as they attempt to knock traditional publishing models out of whack. If it didn’t feel like such a fundamental and remotely insulting misunderstanding of fan culture, if it didn’t feel like a prime chance for corporations to exploit rather than promote, I might even praise Amazon (praise Amazon, for Christ’s sakes) for trying yet one more thing that deviates from the publishing status quo. If the barriers for entry are lowered, does publishing great fiction becomes a question of talent alone — even as something crucial is given up in the exchange? There are parallels with self-publishing and parallels with the broader Kindle Single platform. Who deserves to be published? Why isn’t it simply the person whom people would most like to read?

3.
Surely every person in the entire realm of fan fiction is tired of the monetization question by now. The simple answer is that it really, really isn’t about the money. But people keep on asking anyway: how can so much time and energy and a sheer dizzying number of words be spent on something for no financial compensation? It’s easy enough to say that the person who asks that question doesn’t understand the idea of fan fiction, or doesn’t fully grasp what it means to be a fan of something in general — but that feels dismissive and unhelpful. There is a disconnect here, though, and it’s one that’s tricky for me to articulate, between Amazon and Alloy and the fan fiction community, or between Tumblr and Yahoo and the people who look at 100,000 reblogs and can only see a missed opportunity for advertising.

Is a person who believes in the ultimate democratizing power of the internet bound to be disappointed sooner or later? That scrappy start-ups inevitably sell out — great ideas get acquired by big companies, then twisted beyond recognition? Of course, those great ideas can come from anywhere, right? Perhaps that’s not enough to stem the disillusionment. So maybe that’s one of the appeals of fan fiction, or of the exchange of images and ideas amongst fandoms on Tumblr and elsewhere: there is absolutely no endgame there, beyond the satisfaction of sharing something you like, obsess over, deeply love with other people who love it just as deeply.

There is an enormously freeing diversity in the world of fan fiction. I don’t mean that the writers are diverse — they are mostly female, and surely there must be socioeconomic implications in the ability to sustain such a hobby. I mean that the whole point of it, beyond all that deep love and celebrating any given fandom, is taking a character or a setting or just the tiniest inkling of an idea and rolling with it. The possibilities spin off into exponentially increasing permutations, spurring weird stuff and beautiful stuff, quite often fiction that’s better written than the source material that inspired it, creating fandoms that are so broad and varied and encompassing that a person can usually find whatever they’re seeking within. If not, well, that person may as well just write it herself. If that’s not the most accurate reflection of the rest of the internet — the organic, cultivated internet, grown from the bottom up, with no contracts, no exchanges of cash — then I don’t know what is.

Elizabeth Minkel
is a staff writer for The Millions and writes a regular column about fan culture for the New Statesman. She recently completed an MA in the digital humanities at University College London. She's gotten much better at Twitter in the past year, but she still spends most of her time (/life) on Tumblr. She lives in Brooklyn.

As I was taking notes for a new novel recently, I took a moment to consider point of view. Fatigued from working on one manuscript with multiple first-person limited narrators, and then another with two different narrative elements, I thought how simple it would be, how straightforward, to write this next book with an omniscient point of view. I would write a narrator who had no constraints on knowledge, location, tone, even personality. A narrator who could do anything at any time anywhere. It wasn’t long before I realized I had no idea how to achieve this.

I looked for omniscience among recent books I had admired and enjoyed. No luck. I found three-handers, like The Help. I found crowd-told narratives, like Colum McCann’s elegant Let The Great World Spin. I found what we might call cocktail-party novels, in which the narrator hovers over one character’s shoulder and then another’s, never alighting for too long before moving on.

On the top layer of my nightstand alone, I found Lionel Shriver’sThe Post-Birthday World and Jane Gardam’sOld Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat. The first is a formal experiment in which alternating narratives tell the same story of a marriage—which is really two different stories, their course determined by just one action. The second two give up on shared perspective altogether, splitting the story into separate books. Old Filth tells his story and The Man in the Wooden Hat tells hers. If the contemporary novel had a philosophy, it would be Let’s Agree To Disagree.

It’s tempting to view this current polyphonic narrative spree as a reflection on our times. Ours is a diverse world, authority is fragmented and shared, communication is spread out among discourses. Given these circumstances, omniscience would seem to be not only impossible but also undesirable—about as appropriate for our culture as carrier pigeons. It’s also tempting to assume that if we’re looking for narrative unity, we have to go back before Modernism. We can tell ourselves it was all fine before Stephen Dedalus and his moo-cow, or before Windham Lewis came along to Blast it all up.

No, if omniscience was what I wanted for my next project, I would have to look back further, to a time when the novel hadn’t succumbed to the fragmentation of the modern world.

But try it. Go back to the Victorians or further back to Sterne, Richardson, and Fielding. There’s no omniscience to be found. I suppose I could have spared myself the trouble of a search by looking at James Woods’How Fiction Works. “So-called omniscience,” he says, “is almost impossible.” It turns out that the narrative unity we’ve been looking for is actually a figment of our imagination. The novel maintains an uneasy relationship with authority—not just now, but from its very beginnings.

Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe is often credited with being the first novel in the English language, published in 1719. The anxieties attendant on that role are evident in the way the book is structured. Not comfortable claiming to be simply an invention, Crusoe masquerades as a true story, complete with an editor’s preface declaring the book to be “a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.” Defoe originates the James Frey approach to novel-writing, using the pretense of truth as a source of narrative power.

He repeats almost the same phrasing four years later, in Roxana: “The foundation of this is laid in truth of fact, and so the work is not a story, but a history.” The words seem redundant now—truth, fact, foundation, history. It’s a protesting-too-much that speaks to the unsettled nature of what Defoe was doing: telling a made-up story of such length, scope, and maturity at a time when doing so was still a radical enterprise.

But the most interesting expression of the novel’s predicament comes one year before Roxana, in 1722, when Defoe opens Moll Flanders with an excuse: “The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine.” It’s a clever move. Defoe acknowledges the existence of enough novels that you’d think his position as novelist would be secure (the more the merrier), but he insists that he’s doing something different—and then in the same breath assumes our lack of interest and then preempts it by setting up the other novels as tough competition.

Defoe’s pretense of editors, prefaces, and memorandums is the first stage of what I’ll call the apparatus novel, followed a decade or two later by its close cousin, the epistolary novel. Like its predecessor, the epistolary novel can’t just come out and tell a made-up story—never mind tell one from an all-knowing point of view. In Richardson’s Clarissa especially, the limitations of the individual letter-writers’ points of view create an atmosphere of disturbing isolation. As we read through Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s conflicting accounts, we become the closest thing to an omniscient presence the novel has—except we can’t trust a word of what we’ve read.

So where is today’s omniscience-seeking reader to turn? Dickens, don’t fail me now? It turns out that the Inimitable Boz is no more trustworthy in his narration than Defoe or Richardson or the paragon of manipulative narrators, Tristram Shandy. In fact, Dickens’ narrators jump around all over the place, one minute surveying London from on high, the next deep inside the mind of Little Dorrit, or Nancy, or a jar of jam. Dickens seems to have recognized the paradox of the omniscient point of view: with the ability to be everywhere and know everything comes tremendous limitation. If you’re going to let the furniture do the thinking, you’re going to need the versatility of a mobile and often fragmented narrative stance.

And Dickens is not alone in the 19th century. The Brontës? Practically case studies for first-person narration. Hardy? Maybe, but he hews pretty closely to one protagonist at a time. (Though we do see what’s happening when Gabriel Oak is asleep in Far From the Madding Crowd.) Dickens good friend Wilkie Collins (who famously said the essence of a good book was to “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait”)? The Moonstone is a perfect example of the apparatus novel, anticipating books like David Mitchell’sCloud Atlas, complete with multiple narrators, various types of discourse, and full of statements that successive narrators correct or undermine.

This isn’t to say that there are no omniscient novels anywhere. Look at Eliot or Tolstoy, to jump cultures, or Austen. Sure, the line on Austen is that she could only write about drawing-room life, but she still writes books in which the narrator knows everything that’s going on in the novel’s world. Pride and Prejudice begins with its famous statement about men, money, and wives, and then easily inhabits the minds of various members of the Bennett family and their acquaintances—not through first-person limited, but through the more detached and stance of a true omniscient narration. Doubtless, readers could come up with other works written from an all-knowing perspective. Friends have suggested books as different as The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude as omni-contenders.

All the same, what seems key about the novel is that what we think of as a historical evolution—or a descent from a unified to a fragmented perspective—isn’t an evolution at all. In fact, the novel has always been insecure. It’s just that the manifestation of its insecurity has changed over time. At the outset, it tried to look like a different sort of artifact, a different kind of physical manuscript almost: the novel masked as a diary or a journal—because, really, who knew what a novel was anyway? Later, seeking to convey more intimate thoughts, it took the form of letters, acting like a novel while pretending to be something else, just in case. This is a genre that constantly hedges against disapproval. It’s like a teenager trying not to look like she’s trying hard to be cool. (Novel, who me? Nah, I’m just a collection of letters. I can’t claim any special insight. Unless you find some, in which case, great.)

Omniscience is something that the novel always aspires for but never quite achieves. It would be nice to have the authority of the all-seeing, all-knowing narrator. But we are too tempted by other things, like personality, or form, or the parallax view that is inherent to our existence. This is why, I think, when you ask readers to name an omniscient novel, they name books that they think are omniscient but turn out not to be. Wishful thinking. The omniscient novel is more or less a utopia, using the literal meaning of the word: nowhere.

Appropriately, Thomas More structured Utopia as a kind of fiction, an apparatus novel about a paradise whose exact location he had missed hearing when someone coughed. This was in 1516, two full centuries before Robinson Crusoe, making Utopia a better candidate for First English Novel. But that’s a subject for another day.

I envy the way my oldest son reads, stretched out on the living room couch, all of a sudden this year taking up most of three cushions. Watch his face: his lips move, his eyebrows raise and lower in drastic measures, he smiles, winces, gapes and falls still all in a mere breath.

He practices the cliché – he devours books. But, even better, the books devour him.

I used to be the same way. When I was about ten a pen pal came to visit from all the way across the country and I didn’t notice her for a few days after discovering a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’sMeet the Austins in her suitcase.

“Want to go swimming?” she would ask. “Want to ride bikes? Want to watch TV?”

No. I was reading. I was busy becoming an Austin. There were four kids in that family and in my family there was only me, but for the duration of the book and all subsequent readings, I owned those brothers and sisters. I had to make sure Vicki recovered from her fall off her bike, that Maggie didn’t get Suzie into too much trouble, that nobody froze during the ice storm. A beloved pen pal paled in comparison.

That’s what reading used to feel like: changing into something better, or at least different, for a short time. Becoming the characters. Changing forever. Emily of New Moon, Ramona Cleary, any of Lois Duncan’s savvy heroines, sad Davey from Tiger Eyes, clever kids from Paula Danziger – the list is long. I wasn’t picky.

I’m not one of those creative types who has dark, damp memories of teenage loneliness and long-lasting existential horror, though I have tried at different times to cultivate that image. I was pretty happy. I had friends. I had a horse, a job I loved, parents who were wise enough to let me go most of the time. And I had books, though not quite in the same way I had them in my first decade. Camus and Shakespeare often jostled elbows in my backpack, they also shared space with Christopher Pike and whoever it was wrote the Sweet Valley High series – educational reading. I was a busy kid; I had only a few empty afternoons waiting like warm pools to slide into with a book. I read between the cracks of my daily life and didn’t mind, didn’t notice.

College was where I discovered other people liked books, too. I never got around to sniffing out the sororities, but within the first few weeks of my first semester I became an ardent member of the English Club. People in the English Club read aloud by candlelight and sipped red wine and walked to town to hear Martin Espada and Kurt Vonnegut. In that cramped, dusty office on the second floor of Bartlett Hall I was introduced to e.e.cummings (I know! So late!), James Merrill and Philip Roth in the form of Portnoy’s Complaint.

Who proved to be useful during my sophomore year when I had time to kill while visiting my boyfriend in Atlanta. Portnoy was a keen distraction from curious thoughts about the wineglasses I found on a high shelf in my boyfriend’s kitchen, suspicions about a certain girl he drove home from campus nearly every day, sinking alarm at his obvious comfort in her apartment when we went to visit. Portnoy kept me oddly sane during a tumultuous three-week visit. By the time I boarded a plane heading back to the frozen north, the book was a battered companion after having been read a few dozen times. No human friend could have withstood my needy attentions like that.

Reading as self-defense – a technique I’ve used often. Whenever I travel, I bring a familiar book to keep invasive home sickness at bay. A death in the family? I escape grieving guests to read upstairs in my bed. Marital eruptions? When the dust settles I can be found behind a book. Better than drugs or alcohol for numbing the occasional pain of daily life.

But the way I read in college was different from the way I read as a child. I read from afar. I noticed technique, I could sift through the narrative and explain why a book worked. I loved Roth, Garcia Marquez, Ford and O’Brien, but they were never able to maintain the spell that L’Engle could cast over the whole of me. Not that L’Engle is a better writer. But I was a different reader.

Graduate school was where I met writers and read their books and realized that real people wrote the books I loved. Not that I thought books arrived from some celestial source, but I’d never had a conversation with a writer whose name appeared on a book jacket or two. Before this, my wish to be a writer had shared characteristics with my wish to be a ballerina. Never mind I hadn’t had a dance class since I was three. But Francois Camoin, Abby Frucht, Victoria Redel – they had written books, and they were sitting across the lunch table from me.

Knowing the authors did nothing to decrease the distance I felt from the books I held in my hands. Instead, as I learned better how to decipher the coded technique in any text, that highway between me and the book grew longer. As I became a better writer, I became a more distant reader.

When my first child was born I prepared by reading Carol Shields’Unless. Other expectant moms read thick how-to manuals. I dove headfirst into a story about a mother who acutely misses her daughter, about a daughter who confronts a harshness that alters the way she enters the world. I credit the book for getting me through 24 hours of hard labor. Not towards the end when there were so many people with me. But in the beginning of birth pains, at home while my husband snored in the other room, I escaped the so-far minimal disruption by kneeling on the floor and hovering over the book, rocking my body back and forth. Pain in my belly, pain in the book.

Babies arrive and yes, you might spend a bizarre amount of time watching them sleep, but you also might get a tiny bit bored and long for something normal to do. Like finish one of your favorite books. With my second baby I read Paula Fox’s first memoir, Borrowed Finery, and with my third – well, don’t tell him, but I can’t remember. There were two other children who still needed my reassurance and advice, and brains can be foggy after giving birth. I know I read something, though. Perhaps it was self-defense again; perhaps I look to books to protect me from life’s ultimate highs and lows; maybe I am addicted to the parallel highs and lows books have to offer. I see the world through book-colored glasses.

Now I am a professional reader. Reviewing books is one of several profit-driven jobs I do in between the tasks related to the care of three little boys and a house and a husband and a plethora of chickens. And reviewing has perhaps changed the way I read more than any other life shift. I read faster. I could, if I weren’t so inconveniently honest, write a comprehensive and accurate review of most of the (bad) books after only 20 pages. But I keep going. I read with an ear open to possible quotes, I look for mistakes, patterns of textual mayhem, suggestions on how to improve the next book. Some days, reading all these bad books is enough to make me turn to television.

But there are good things about bad books. I read over my own fiction with an ear bent precisely toward what can go wrong. I read like a reader instead of a writer.

When I find myself audience to a good review book the sensation is akin to that felt while watching my middle boy learn to ride his bike. With fewer moments of sheer fear. I slow down, I bite my tongue to keep from cheering out loud, and I type very, very fast after I put the book down. I swoon over these books – The Dark Side of Love, Last Night in Montreal, The Cold Earth. And sometimes, even when the youngest son shrieks for cookies and the oldest laments the lack of toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom and the middle child begs loudly for a new bike, I don’t quite hear them. I have been devoured.

Am I a happier reader now than I was when I was eight? Is today’s generation happier than our cavemen ancestors? Evolution both solves problems and creates new ones; as plenty of recent books explain: happiness is relative. I still love to read. Reading might be sweeter now that I fall in love with fewer books. And sometimes knowing why I love a certain book is a sweetness in itself.

On my way to bed these days I pass my oldest boy still awake, eyes roaming the page in ever-widening sweeps. He’s tired. “But I can’t stop reading,” he whispers.

One comment:

Very good post, Elizabeth. As a fanfic reader and writer, I was disgusted when I saw Amazon’s licensing terms. Exploit is the right word here.

And I don’t even mind monetizing fanfics. Fans should be free to give other fans money as an uncoerced act of gratitude. But what Amazon is trying to do is sort of like making your spouse pay a fee for every good meal, kiss on the cheek, and compliment. Then Amazon is all puzzled, “But aren’t you glad to be making money for those things now? Before you didn’t get paid anything.”

My idea of fanfic monetization is putting a bitcoin address in the author’s notes so that people can donate if they wish on a “support the artist” basis. There are plenty of fanfic authors who could make a decent living this way. The result would be more high quality fanfic, all free as the breeze, with no greedy middlemen leeching 65-80% of the profits off the author.

I’m hopeful that I will see copyright reform in my lifetime so that I can write fanfic without being sued or exploited.

1.
When you read a book, it is a story within the story. The French call this mise-en-abîm: the condition of being between two mirrors with an abyss of yous staring back.

My grandmother had a dressing room wallpapered in mirrors. As a child, I liked to stand in the center and slowly move my arms up and down. Like synchronized swimmers in underwater flight, an infinite number of mes moved as one. It made me question my reality like Alice through the looking glass. Was I me? Or was that me once reflected? Twice reflected? Three times? Maybe they thought they were me just as much as I did. Maybe those mes had their own adventures. It was the first time I felt fully confronted by the unsettling nature of existence and its possible layers of life.

Being a reader is similar. You turn the page of the fictional story while an hour of your own passes. The characters breathe, laugh and cry, and so do you. When you finish their tale, you close the book and set it aside, dreaming of their ever-after, while stepping out into yours. But you don’t leave the story as you found it. No, it’s forever changed. The evidence is there: a chocolate smudge, a tea stain, beach sand, dandelion spores, a stray hair, a note, a name, a message. The story has been splintered into a duplicate image, a reflection of you in bits between the pages.

2.My eighth-grade English teacher decided it’d be a good idea for us to do an introductory unit on Shakespeare. The directions were simple: pick a play and read it. My family owned a weathered volume of The Complete Pelican Shakespeare on the highest shelf of our bookcase. I’d never cracked the spine, favoring colorful copies of Judy Blume and Sweet Valley High still smelling of press glue and Scholastic shipping peanuts. TCPS was my dad’s college copy from the United States Military Academy at West Point. It looked similarly militant, bound in tar black and as thick as a Bible. Nonetheless, I was excited. It was an emblem of maturity to read Master Shakespeare, and I knew exactly where I was headed: Romeo and Juliet.

So I climbed the bookcase and freed the old whale from its dusty catacomb, carried the thing to my bedroom and plopped it open on my desk. What I first remember was how thin the pages were—like edible rice paper. It was this gossamer taction that made a pulpy envelope stand out. It bulged the fine print from fifty pages deep. There, between the Merry Wives of Windsor and All’s Well That Ends Well. I pulled it free and felt the weight of age, ripe for the booklouse taking. The bottom edge had yellowed where it’d spent decades with a foot outside the covers. It was addressed to my father. The seal torn open. A moment of distinct deliberation. It was not my letter to read. However, simply putting it back and moving on to “Two households, both alike in dignity” seemed an insurmountable task for a curious thirteen year old.

I carefully unfolded the letter and recognized my mother’s handwriting. Dated November 1, 1976. Two years before my parent’s marriage and four years before my birth. My stomach double-dipped. “My Love,” it began and went on to speak of longing across great distance, present obstacles, and promises of eternal devotion. Such things I’d only ever heard in epic ballads and fairy tales. I knew my parents loved each other, but up until that day, I’d thought it rather orthodox—their love story. Nothing like the ardor of Penelope and Odysseus, the fire of Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy, the potency of Scarlett and Rhett, or the yearning of Daisy and Gatsby.

Understand, I kept a journal list of eulogized paramours. Marianne Dashwood was my literary kindred, both of us basing our amatory knowledge on illusions. Yet here was reality, and I reimagined my mother: young, beautiful, unmarried and besot with an equally young, handsome lieutenant hundreds of miles away. No bestselling romance couldn’t equal such ripe character fodder.

I tried to move on to Romeo and Juliet, but my mind was far from Verona. It’d taken root in an austere military dorm where my father must’ve run his fingers over that very page, read the words and felt his heart hiccup, then quietly tucked it away beneath layers of sonnets and what some consider the greatest love story ever told.

I had cried every time I’d seen Romeo and Juliet performed, but the first time I read it, my emotions seemed corked. They were tapped later when my father kissed my mother as she served steaming plates of rice and beans. Perplexed but knowing my penchant for pathos, she merely shook her head and said, “Sarah, eat your supper, love.”

3.
I’m drawn to used bookstores like a fruit fly to summer cantaloupe. I seek out these harvest stalls and spend hours flittering about the book rinds, deciding which to crack open and possibly drown in.

In Norfolk, Virginia, my one-bedroom apartment was on the city’s only cobblestone street appropriately named Freemason. Within a week of moving in, I discovered a used bookstore two blocks over called Bibliophile Bookshop. Its entrance was blockaded by hundreds of dog-eared books, a “4 for $1” cart outside, and a salty-haired proprietor who kept the door open in the balmy harbor July and played concertos on his radio.

On one such sticky afternoon, I buzzed the stacks. You’ve got to go deep for the good stuff. All the pretty, contemporary titles are placed at the front for the quick buyer, who is not me. I dig, burrowing down to the pappy volumes that smell like they’ve been dipped in lake water. It was here in the dredges that I found my piece of gold. A vermilion cover plucked from the pile; its inner pages hung on by sinewy threads. The thing looked a bloody mess. I could barely make out the title from the pockmarks, scuffs and stains: Anna Lombard by Victoria Cross. Two strong female names that deserved attention. But before I’d read one word penned by Ms. Cross, a penciled dedication brought me to a full stop. Unmarred by all that had injured the rest of the book, it read: To Edith, Always remember. Love, Mummy. The kind of simple inscription anybody might write. It was the “Always remember” that resonated. Always remember what?

I laxly flipped Anna Lombard pages, my imagination spinning its own tale of what Edith’s Mummy wanted her to remember. Then something fell out. My instinct assumed I’d broken the last bit of binding and the rest of the pages would soon flutter to the floor. I was wrong. At my feet was square, sepia photo with scalloped edges. I saw the back script before the image: Mummy & Loretta before she passed. 1941. On the flipside were two women sitting on a park bench, faces mapped with laugh lines, arms pretzeled to each other. One of these women was Mummy. I studied the faded expressions, and despite rational deduction that both were now deceased, I agonized over to whom the message referred. Who was the “she” that passed? Loretta or Mummy? It ached to think it was the latter—Edith’s Mummy who wrote that she must “always remember”… something, which had to be of great meaning, sentimental or profound, for her to have said so.

I tried to read the first chapter of Cross’s novel but couldn’t sympathize with the main character, Gerald Ethridge, and his faithful love to Anna Lombard. My head and heart were already immersed in another narrative: Mummy and Edith and Loretta. Women who lived real lives and left the tangible proof of their story here—in my hands.

I wanted that book. I still want it. Years later, I can’t get it or them out of my mind. But I didn’t buy it for the proprietor’s $8 price tag. I worried that if I took it from that place, moved it with me to another city or state or country, whatever it was that Mummy wanted Edith to remember, wouldn’t be. Maybe Edith or her kin were somewhere still in Norfolk. This book with all its treasures belonged to them. So I lodged the photo as securely as I could deep inside, wrapped the cover over and placed it on a high shelf where I thought it’d be safe from further ruin or imprudent hands. Someplace where if the right person saw the crimson spine and title, they would remember whatever it was they were to always.

4.
Some will say it’s narcissism and perhaps they are correct, but I leave breadcrumbs of myself in every book. Train and plane tickets are my favorites. I use them as bookmarks and then purposely abandon them.

Recently, I let a friend borrow Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. When returning my copy she asked, “Were you in Dallas last September?” She was surprised when I said I wasn’t. “It’s just—I found this in your book.” She thumbed through my copy and retrieved a ticket stub. I eyed it and remembered that I’d transferred planes in Dallas on my way home to Virginia. I read the novel on the flight, I explained. She sighed. “Mystery solved!”

I laughed and then felt bad. I hoped her imagination hadn’t been as relentless as mine—that she’d been able to fully engage in Berlinski’s novel without my story nagging at the edges of her dreamscape. But my friend is very much like me, so she’d probably stayed up pondering my mysterious travels more than the fictional Dyalo village and the Walker family trials. I made a mental note to siphon my books’ contents before lending—for the sake of my friends’ reading experiences more than myself.

And yet, my habit continues. I was at a café reading and eating grilled chicken skewers not too long ago. At the end of the meal, I slipped my sauce-splattered receipt in the back of the book. For safe keeping, I told myself, but truthfully hoping that one day, years from now, I’ll rediscover it and remember the taste of sweet rosemary and hickory smoke, the heated blue of El Paso summers, the person I was when I first ventured into that novel’s territory.

These bits of my day-to-day are life fragments, evidence that I was here. My library isn’t simply a collage of ink and paper. It’s stuffed with these secret stashes. And I use a variety of items: empty envelopes, expired coupons, recipes, gum wrappers that make the pages fruity fresh, photographs, baggage claims, postcards, birthday cards, To Do lists, sticky notes scribbled by my husband with messages ranging from Gatsby’s out of dog food to I love you, have a beautiful day. All stuck in the pages.

I’d never consciously appraised this book littering behavior until the Berlinski episode. I wondered if I was alone in my bizarre fascination, then I was introduced to the Forgotten Bookmarks blog. Michael Popek, a used-bookstore bibliophile, posts all the lovely discoveries he finds in his shop’s acquisitions. I spent more time than I care to admit scrolling through his online treasure chest, captivated by the notes, tickets, letters, photographs, drawings and recipes—the layers of stories in the stories at large.

As an author and reader, I’m routinely juggling viewpoints, seeing through the eyes of my characters, others’ characters and my own. It’s a somewhat schizophrenic existence. So I question where I stand in the mise-en-abîms: At the top of the watery abyss looking down or at the bottom looking up? Or maybe I’m one of the many reflections between, moving her arms in rhythm with the others, yet uniquely me with a story indelibly my own.